The heart is the center of a person's circulatory system. The left portions of the heart, including the left atrium (LA) and left ventricle (LV), draw oxygenated blood from the lungs and pump it to the organs of the body to provide the organs with their metabolic needs for oxygen. The right portions of the heart, including the right atrium (RA) and right ventricle (RV), draw deoxygenated blood from the body organs and pump it to the lungs where the blood gets oxygenated. These mechanical pumping functions are accomplished by contractions of the heart. In a normal heart, the sinoatrial (SA) node, the heart's natural pacemaker, generates electrical impulses, called action potentials, that propagate through an electrical conduction system to various regions of the heart to cause the muscular tissues of these regions to depolarize and contract. The electrical conduction system includes, in the order by which the electrical impulses travel in a normal heart, internodal pathways between the SA node and the atrioventricular (AV) node, the AV node, the His bundle, and the Purkinje system including the right bundle branch (RBB, which conducts the electrical impulses to the RV) and the left bundle branch (LBB, which conducts the electrical impulses to the LV). More generally, the electrical impulses travel through an AV conduction pathway to cause the atria, and then the ventricles, to contract.
Tachyarrhythmia occurs when the heart contracts at a rate higher than a normal heart rate. Tachyarrhythmia generally includes ventricular tachyarrhythmia (VT) and supraventricular tachyarrhythmia (SVT). VT occurs, for example, when a pathological conduction loop forms in the ventricles through which electrical impulses travel circularly within the ventricles, or when a pathologically formed electrical focus generates electrical impulses from the ventricles. SVT includes physiological sinus tachyarrhythmia and pathologic SVTs. The physiological sinus tachyarrhythmia occurs when the SA node generates the electrical impulses at a particularly high rate. A pathologic SVT occurs, for example, when a pathologic conduction loop forms in an atrium. Fibrillation occurs when the heart contracts at a tachyarrhythmia rate with an irregular rhythm. Ventricular fibrillation (VF), as a ventricular arrhythmia with an irregular conduction, is a life threatening condition requiring immediate medical treatment such as ventricular defibrillation. Atrial fibrillation (AF), as a SVT with an irregular rhythm, though not directly life threatening, also needs medical treatment such as atrial defibrillation to restore a normal cardiac function and to prevent the deterioration of the heart.
Implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) are used to treat tachyarrhythmias, including fibrillation. To deliver an effective cardioversion-defibrillation therapy, an ICD automatically classifies each tachyarrhythmia by its type and/or origin. One example of arrhythmia classification performed by an ICD is morphology-based classification that determines the origin of a detected tachyarrhythmia episode by analyzing a correlation between morphological features of a cardiac signal sensed during the tachyarrhythmia episode and morphological features of a template signal sensed during a known type rhythm. However, morphological changes of a cardiac signal during a tachyarrhythmia episode may differ from patient to patient, as well as from time to time. Additionally, variations in the morphological features may also attribute to changes in other physiological factors. Therefore, there is a need for analyzing the ICD's classification of each tachyarrhythmia episode to allow for accurate diagnosis of the patient's conditions and evaluation of the ICD's performance.